Mozzarella Most Murderous

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Carolyn Blue,

  “Have Fork, Will Travel,”

  Albany Morning Post

  14

  Four for Amalfi

  Bianca

  What a drive we had! Hank chose to take the scenic Nastro Azzurro route from the west side of Sorrento across the peninsula on twisting roads through farmlands, terraced orchards, and vineyards. Both women in the back seat asked to stop every few miles. Eliza Stackpole saw people selling bags of wild oregano on the roadside and wanted to ask them questions about native herbs, but neither Hank nor I offered to translate. Carolyn wanted to buy a bag, but I assured her that the U.S. government would not let her bring it back into her country. “Or maybe you plan to eat it before you leave,” I suggested. Of course, she couldn’t. She didn’t even have cooking facilities.

  Then we passed through Saint Agata Dei Due Golfi, where, Carolyn remarked, there was a Michelin-starred restaurant. Hank said it was too early for lunch, and we’d never get to Amalfi if we stopped and waited for the restaurant to open. She then talked him into a quick stop to see an amazing marble altar, multicolored and immense, at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Carolyn had found it in a guidebook as soon as she saw the name of the town on a road sign. Eliza thought the altar gaudy and declared that she much preferred the more austere churches of England. Then we maneuvered out of the parking lot, which, for some reason, was crowded with farm vehicles and equipment, and continued across the peninsula to Positano and the Amalfi Coast.

  The coast road was intimidating, and Hank grumbled that it would have been easier to come by boat. He was probably right. Cliffs towered above us and sheared away hundreds of meters down to the water where the tide dashed itself into spray against the rocks. The road twisted, clinging to its ledge, in turns so sharp that large vehicles had to edge back and forth to get around, taking up both lanes in their efforts to keep from tumbling in a long, long fall to the wild waters below.

  Hank Girol’s rented car, sleek and sporty with its top folded down, had only two doors. Of course, that meant I sat in front with him because I could never have scrambled over the folded down front seat into the back—not carrying my immense stomach before me. I felt bad for Carolyn. Eliza Stackpole, who had replaced her heavy tweeds with loose trousers and blouse, boots fit for rock climbing, and a floppy cotton hat that blended nicely with her khaki hair, insisted on sitting where she couldn’t see how far we had to fall if we went off the road. After they had squeezed in back and Hank moved my seat back far enough to accommodate my tummy, Carolyn had to pull her knees up under her chin. No wonder she wanted to get out for everything that interested her.

  Eliza, of course, prattled about the trees and bushes. At one point she remarked that the protective black nets on the lemon groves looked like hairnets on green hair in a punk beauty saloon. I was astounded to think that she’d ever been in such a place. I asked her what her favorite hair-dye color was, but she thought dying one’s hair was a waste of time. Did that mean that her strange hair color was natural? I asked whether the English girls with green hair favored mohawks or long frizzes. Eliza said she never talked to girls like that; she’d just peeked into the window of such a shop and then hurried away.

  Poor Carolyn couldn’t have been at all comfortable, stuffed in back there, but she didn’t complain. In fact, the possibility of tumbling down the cliff once we got on that road didn’t seem to enter her mind. She folded herself into awkward positions, hung over the side of the car, stretched out her arms and hands holding her tiny camera, and took photos of everything on both sides of the road. Then, when she got a picture that looked particularly good to her, she passed the camera around so the rest of us could look at the little window where the picture appeared.

  I couldn’t fault her enthusiasm because the water foamed against jagged rocks, shimmered blue-green away from the cliffs, and sparkled like diamonds in sunshine beyond the swathes of color. Still, I’m afraid that we were never sufficiently excited about her pictures. Hank had to keep his eyes on the road, which was crowded with cars, tour buses, and even people walking to stairs that dropped down the rock face to hotels and houses beyond our range of vision.

  I was clinging to the arm rest to keep my baby from being hurled against the dashboard when Hank had to brake sharply for foolish drivers or the warning honk of a bus that was about to attempt a dangerous curve on the other side of the road. So I had only one hand to take the camera and often no desire to look away from the road. And Eliza was still going on and on about flowers, trees, and cacti. What was the name of the blue flowers that hung in lovely sheets on the cliff? We didn’t know. What tree was that, clinging like an upright greenish black umbrella to a jut of stone ahead to the left? Plane tree? I wasn’t sure. I was a city girl. Did those cacti bloom and, if so, when? None of us could say, although Carolyn, a desert dweller, thought cacti bloomed whenever it rained. She had to promise Eliza copies of any vegetation she photographed.

  What all of us could identify were the orchards, growing on the terraced cliffs, walnuts and peaches (for which Sorrento was famous; Carolyn said some food writer, goodness knows how many centuries ago, had called Sorrento peaches “delicious enough to raise the dead”), and particularly the lemon groves. They were so pretty, and they reminded me, not of hairnets on green hair, but of the region’s favorite liqueur, Limoncello. I wouldn’t have minded a little glass right then to take off the edge of fear engendered by the road. Probably I should have been a sensible mother-to-be and stayed safely at the hotel. The baby certainly seemed to think so. It kicked so hard from time to time that its little foot poked my dress against the dashboard.

  Nonetheless, I was happy to be on this gorgeous coast again with the wind in my hair and the sun warming my face. How lucky we were. When we left Sorrento to cross the peninsula to the coast on the other side from the Bay of Naples, we left heavy clouds and the dark thrust of the volcano behind us and drove into the sunshine. The stacked hotels of Positano, marching down the cliffs to the sea, glittered white under blue sky as we crawled through the narrow, crowded streets, and Hank flirted shamelessly with me and I with him.

  I could almost forget that I had passed the dreaded age of thirty, that I had a baby the size of an elephant waiting to be born, and that my companions were in early-to middle-middle age. But we were so happy and light-hearted. Every time Carolyn spotted a shadow on the horizon, she thought it was Capri, which she evidently had a great desire to visit. She told us about the Emperor Tiberius, who had built castles and villas for himself there, and ruled the empire from the island for the last twenty-three years of his life while he seduced beautiful young boys and had those who became boring tossed into the sea. Eliza was horrified. I noted with interest Carolyn’s knowledge of homosexual history. Perhaps it was important to my theory of the murder, although Tiberius and his reputation were well known, except perhaps to a shrubbery-besotted Englishwoman.

  Hank promised Carolyn that she would see Capri, and I, laughing, insisted that I be taken along. Eliza asked only about the vegetation on Capri, and when we were all disappointingly vague on the subject, she lost interest because she had so much to look at right there at the side of the road.

  15

  In a Shady Amalfi Piazza

  Bianca

  When we pulled into Amalfi at last, I was in need of a comfortable chair on the shady side of a piazza. Carolyn, having used up all the memory on the smart card in her digital camera, had to replace it with another card. Eliza bent vigorously to tighten the laces of her hiking boots (Hank had refused to stop along the road when she wanted to take off up a cliff to pull up some plant that had caught her eye) and insisted that we hike straight up the hill away from the cathedral. Hank agreed, so I sat in the piazza and ordered a cool drink while the others, Carolyn not looking particularly pleased at the steep hill she faced, went off to explore because Hank said it was too early for lunch and Eliza pointed out that the cathedral would not open until two.

  What a pleasure
to sit in the shade with a cool lemon drink and no one to hand me a camera or ask me about a plant, as if I were a botanist instead of a retired tour guide and mother of two and eight-ninths children. My feet and ankles were swollen, but the baby had fallen asleep. I bought flowers from a wizened, shawled woman making the rounds of the tables and stared lazily up at the dark and light patterns of the cathedral stones, the colonnade of rounded arches, and the many, many steps leading up to the door of the church. Perhaps I wouldn’t visit the cathedral either, although I remembered a lovely cloister and a dark crypt that had beguiled me years ago. Could Carolyn be both a murderer and a lover of cathedrals? A bisexual and a prude? It was too much for me, and I gave up wondering.

  They were back in fifteen minutes—or thirty; I may have dozed off—Hank still cheerful, Eliza disappointed in the plant life but invigorated by the climb, and Carolyn eager to tell me about a cultural contrast she had witnessed and taken pictures of: a slender young man working at a laptop computer at a table in an outdoor café, while another young man, sun-browned and muscular, drove a donkey loaded with bags of rough stones to the top of the street. There he tumbled the stones into a pile, leapt onto the bare back of the donkey, and road it downhill. “The past and the present,” she exclaimed triumphantly, and showed me the pictures. Dear God, but the man on the donkey was handsome. I admired her pictures and forbore to tell her that the past and the present rubbed up against each other everywhere in Italy—nowhere more so than here where Greeks and Romans had fought for and colonized the land, where maritime kingdoms (Amalfi had been a powerful one in the Middle Ages) had flourished and waned, and where despotic foreign kings had held the people in thrall and delayed the birth of the modern world.

  When Eliza looked at the photo of the donkey man, she exclaimed, “My goodness, he’s as brown as oil.”

  Now that was a disgusting simile. What kind of oil was brown? “Do you cook with brown oil in England?” I asked, wondering if I’d been so unfortunate as to eat something cooked with it while on a visit to London. The idea made me a bit queasy.

  “I know where that saying comes from,” said Carolyn. “Actually, it’s quite interesting. From about the fourth century the Catholic Church wouldn’t let Christians eat meat on what they called “lean” days—Lent, feasts, and whatnot. Even lard and butter were prohibited because they were animal products. So only olive and vegetable oils could be used for cooking until—I don’t remember—some time in the Middle Ages. That meant people in northern Europe, where there were no olive trees, had to import oil. The traders in Spain and Italy took advantage of the situation and sent bad oil. That’s why the English began saying ‘brown as oil,’ referring to the nasty imported stuff, which was all they could get.”

  “Wouldn’t you know!” exclaimed Eliza. “I read in the Times that the olive oil, vinegar, and wine that are supposed to be from Italy are really fakes. Personally, I think the European Union should put a stop to that sort of thing. How can they expect us to give up the pound for the euro with all that cheating going on? I’m against the euro and the European Union. We English should keep to our own ways.”

  I had to laugh. “Which do you dislike more?” I asked. “The fake Italian olive oil or the euro?” Whoops! The baby woke up and gave me a hearty kick. I gave him a gentle, calming pat. I myself was offended that Italy was being accused of exporting brown oil and goodness knows what else these days.

  “My goodness,” said Eliza, staring at my stomach. “You’ve got a football player there. Definitely a boy.”

  “She already has two soccer players,” said Carolyn, “and one is a lovely little girl named Giulia.”

  With that, we went into a café that had been recommended by the flower lady and dined on fritto misto, French fries, wine, and dulce. Fish and chips, Eliza called the entree, but she was wrong. In England the batter is never so light and crisp, and there are no calamari to be found in the English version of mixed, fried fish. In fact, Eliza wouldn’t eat hers; she thought squid were “nasty.” I noted that Carolyn was happy to take a share of the spurned delicacy. I tried to talk my companions into Amalfi’s famous chocolate eggplant dessert (a medieval import from Turkey during the Amalfi empire days), but no one wanted to try it, not even Carolyn. She opted for lemon torte, and the others had mixed gelato. How boring! They didn’t even want to taste my melanzane in salsa cioccolato.

  During lunch most of the talk revolved around Paolina Marchetti. Hank seemed very interested in her, or perhaps he was very interested in Carolyn. She certainly looked pretty that day, more vivid somehow, and where was the Charles-de-Gaulle bruise? Gone. At any rate, Hank quizzed Carolyn about every word the dead girl had said. Maybe he planned to launch his own investigation into her death. And the tale Carolyn told us was interesting. It made me wish that I had known Paolina.

  The story revolved around the small, red leather book in which Paolina wrote poetry that was inspired by an American poet, Edna somebody, not a very poetic name, and I had never heard of her, although she must have been a very sexy lady. Promiscuous was the word Carolyn used to describe her. Paolina had found a book of the woman’s poetry in a musty bookstore while the girls of her convent school were visiting the town on a day out. When the nun teaching her English class had required a translation of a piece of English poetry, Paolina had chosen a long poem from that book, evidently something about death and rebirth. The teaching sister found the poem confusing and probably not in accordance with the Faith, as did the Reverend Mother when the translation was passed on for her opinion.

  Thereafter, Paolina was praised for her skill in translating the work—the title had something to do with the Renaissance, although the bit that Carolyn quoted seemed to be about mountains, woods, and water—but our late, adventurous secretary was reprimanded for her choice of subject matter and told to read no more of the American’s poetry. Naturally all the girls then became interested, searched out books, translated them, and giggled in the dark at the poems about love and infidelity.

  Carolyn ended this tale by saying that she herself had read an excellent biography of the poet and had offered to send one to Paolina. But then the young woman died, and the offer was moot. Remembering my own days in convent school, I found the story and its heroine delightful. I wished that I had known her.

  Over dulce, Carolyn told of a wedding party she and Paolina had seen outside a church in Sorrento with burly men in black tuxedoes prowling the perimeters and keeping the tourists away. “She evidently had great contempt for the Mafia,” Carolyn remarked, “and she said that it was definitely a Mafia wedding. But really, does Sorrento seem like a Mafia-type place?”

  “The Mafia are everywhere,” said Eliza. “Not just Sicily and America. Anyone at these tables might be one.” She glanced around the café suspiciously.

  “Bull!” said Hank. “All that talk of the Mafia—it’s just rumors.”

  “How very naïve of you, Mr. Girol,” Eliza retorted. “Your New Jersey is probably full of them.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Stackpole,” he agreed. “They own all the pizzerias. You take your life in your hands when you want to pick up a pepperoni and mushroom to go.”

  Carolyn started to laugh, and Girol grinned at her. “Very dangerous, New Jersey,” he added, glancing at his watch. “If we want to see the cathedral, we’d better get over there. I’d like to beat the heavy, late afternoon traffic.”

  I didn’t go. Why climb all those steps when I could count on Carolyn to bring back pictures? And she did take a lovely photo of the cloister with its surround of white columns and pointed arches, and its garden of palm trees ringed by flowers, edged walkways, and a fountain in the middle. If there hadn’t been so many steps up to the church, I’d have enjoyed sitting in that garden. Instead the baby and I dozed in the piazza, waited on by a solicitous waiter who plied me with cool, fruity drinks and gelato.

  When they returned, we walked to the car, and Carolyn told me that two Carabinieri officers, a m
an and a woman, had arrived that morning. “They have very fancy uniforms, and I had high hopes that they’d do a better job of investigating Paolina’s death than Lieutenant Buglione is doing. Anything Signora Ricci-Tassone wants, he agrees to. But then, the Carabinieri didn’t even want to talk to me. They were more interested in having breakfast at the hotel buffet. And why are there two police forces that investigate murders?”

  “They’re the military police.” I grinned. “They fight wars, crime, and any attempts to redesign their pretty uniforms or to interfere with their right to carry submachine guns. I called them myself, but since I never saw them, I thought they’d ignored the whole thing—found a terrorist to chase or a riot to quell.”

  “I should have guessed that anyone in a uniform that elaborate would be worthless in a murder investigation,” said Carolyn. “They probably won’t even bother to interview me.”

  On a visit to Amalfi, a friend, who chose to rest in a shady piazza instead of going sightseeing, confessed that while we more ambitious tourists were climbing hills and cathedral steps, she had consumed, in our absence, three helpings of gelato (stracciatella, which is plain ice cream with crunchy chocolate bits; zabaglione, extra-creamy ice cream made with eggs and Marsala wine; and fragola e limone, strawberry and lemon), four cold fruit drinks, a goblet of cold white wine, and a coffee granita. Tired and somewhat damp with perspiration, I must admit that I envied her.